Mod Superhero

Chapter 7.16 - Diving In

Emmett dove into the canal with barely a splash. His synthetic skin registered the chill of the water but it was just a detail, like the subtle distortion of the light. Instead of funneling power to propel himself and risk kicking up sediment, Emmett used his feet. He'd only been swimming four times in his life and had never learned the correct way, but he had something better.

Nanites reformed along his body. They continued cloaking him, but now streamlined him and formed fins around his feet. Inhuman strength and flexibility took care of the rest. Emmett glided through the canal with efficiency and speed that would've made a shark jealous.

Above the surface, New Venice basked in sunlight. Below it, Emmett moved like a ghost.

He reached the edge of the structure—a section of submerged stone crusted with a layer of mineral growth. The hairline magic gap shimmered in his UV vision, its threads so tightly wound that they would've been invisible to anyone except a powerful mage. His earlier tendril still lingered there, disappearing into the seam in reality.

Emmett pulled the rest of his swarm in, and then began to layer it over himself and the tendril. The tendril thickened, stretching the magic gap wider. At the same time, he cocooned himself in additional layers. Emmett's onboard senses faded until he only saw the world through digital connections and cyberspace.

With a thought, he followed the filament.

It wasn't a door. Not even a proper gateway. It was like squeezing through a pinhole threaded into reality, and yet it accepted him without resistance. The water around him didn't follow. His body didn't ripple or twist. Instead, the gap stretched—just slightly—like the world itself was bending to let him through.

For a fraction of a second, Emmett was between places. Not swimming, not falling. Just... passing through. It reminded him, weirdly, of diagrams he'd seen in old anatomy books. A fetus slipping through a birth canal.

Then the sensation ended. The pressure dropped out.

Gravity tilted. The nanite sheath adjusted instantly, reconfiguring itself for stability. His feet found something solid and level—not metal or wood, but glass. The cocoon peeled away from his body, leaving him standing alone in the demiplane—in the vault.

Emmett stood at the edge of an immense chamber. Anyone else would've seen a slow moving, dazzling display of light, like a chandelier spinning underwater. But Emmett saw the magic workings underneath in unmarred UV light.

The chamber was vast and domed like the inside of a planetarium. But there were no planets. Instead, huge circular mirrors orbited overhead in a complex dance. Each floated silently along its own invisible track, their surfaces tilting and shimmering as they passed beams of focused light between them—except that the reflections didn't behave properly. Emmett focused on the mirrors and noted that the light distorted and shifted. At a glance each lens appeared smooth and clear, but there were subtle UV etchings in each.

The air smelled like ozone and crystal polish, and the room was silent, save for the faint whisper of sliding glass.

Emmett walked forward. The floor was a solid sheet of black glass, smooth but humming with active magic. Its reflection barely showed his outline, like uncertain he truly belonged there. Even the echo of his boots sounded off.

He glanced back toward the narrowing seam in reality behind him. The nanite tendril still connected him to the surface, a thread stretching through a hairline fracture in the wall. So far, it was holding.

Emmett turned back toward the glass planetarium and time slowed to a crawl as he took in the details.

Hundreds of fine UV filaments spiderwebbed across the chamber. Each thread arced from mirror to mirror, branching through invisible strata of magic. At every intersection, a different glow pulsed—sigils and glyphs etched into light. Anchors in spacetime. They shimmered faintly, like the numbered ticks along the rim of a clock, each one corresponding to an artifact hidden within the vault.